Synopsis

In the year 2099, mankind has colonized parts of the Solar System thanks to the evolution of space travel. To venture further beyond what man has accomplished, the space vessel Starlight is launched. After rescuing a mysterious girl from a wreckage near the asteroid fields, the crew of the Starlight plot a perilous journey towards the Canopus system in search of the planet known only as "Odin" - the possible key to all forms of life.

Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight (also known as Odin: Starlight Mutiny) is not simply a dated, clumsy or overambitious film. It’s not just a bad film either. Such meager achievements wouldn’t justify its reputation as one of the worst, expensive fuck ups in history of anime features.

Odin is a *horrible* film in which pretty much anything that can go wrong in a big budget megaproduction goes wrong. It’s meandering, nonsensical, boring and doesn’t even see its own (meandering nonsensical and boring) story to end because the film was planned as part of trilogy. If you make it through Odin’s painful 2+ hours of incompetent filmmaking - and get to witness majestic band Loudness in flesh as a reward – you’re no wiser than the characters about what the point of it all was.

The film has the coherence and firm grip on its course you’d expect from torturous project that went through writers and directors quicker than pixiv churns out porn of new anime titles. Most glaring fault in the film’s directing would be the epidemic problems with pacing and allocating time. To put it simply pretty much everything in the film takes much more time than needed and the focus given to things that don’t ultimately matter - for example endless panning shots of the titular Starlight space vessel and the fetishistic obsession with characters tweaking and pushing the buttons and knobs of the ship – would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dreadfully dull.

The beginning of the film illustrates this well: the film starts with romantically tinged glorification of mankind’s conquest of seas and exploration culminating in the old metaphor of space being the new unknown sea for us to explore – it also serves as a crash course to the space technology of the setting. Now there’s nothing wrong with such old school introduction in principle – it’s just that in Odin’s case it manages to drag on for *over seven minutes* and it’s used to clumsily explain the world instead of revealing these facts gradually through the actual narrative. Everyone loves infodumps!

After the clumsy infodump finally ends the grand tale finally starts – and with “starts” I mean: masterpiece by cheesy 80s metal band Loudness starts to play and clearly inspired by its chest hair growing manlyness the ship crew proceed to run, jog and hop through endless corridors high-fiving each other. They drool at Starlight, scream, run some more, board Starlight, jog and hop some more, situate themselves at command desks and then proceed to tweak and touch the buttons of the ship with disturbing passion while metal gods bless their every move with heavenly chords. Cue all too many cuts of the “Space Sailer” Starlight from every angle imaginable thrown in for good measure. Needless to say this piece of editing and storytelling prowess lasts through the entire damn song and has pretty much no relevance for the story.

(What do you mean the film was obviously obligated to promote the band? It’s not like out of place Loudness music is everywhere over the film, no sir! )

With the new crew members comfortable with the ship and after meeting the veteran officers we can get into the next sequence: a painfully overlong launch as Starlight starts its virgin journey. Cue a ton of flashy lights – the ship interiors occasionally resembles disco more than anything else – and knob pushing button tweaking keyboard smashing dreadfulness where nothing actually happens apart from film’s clear intent to fetishize this piece of technological marvel that happens to look like old sailing ship from 18th Century IN SPACE.

Afterwards we get one more crew member introduced in incredibly illogical and shoddy fashion and distress call from asteroid field Starlight decides to answer. Cue, you guessed it, another bout of knob pushing button tweaking keyboard smashing dreadfulness as the brave heroes “speed” to help.

Oh look, a plot finally appeared around 30 minutes mark! (nevertheless it takes another 30 minutes for the search for Odin to actually start!)

I think I’ve made my point by now. What follows from thereon gets increasingly stupid, increasingly illogical and increasingly annoying as the film sleepwalks in snail pace towards its end. A woman who babbles on about this planet “Odin” thanks to her headache/orgasm powers gets saved, hugeass monstrous AI ship is found from asteroid field before it blows up for no adequately explained reason, Loudness inspired idiocy keeps on happening, yadda yadda. The film’s storyline is complete wreck and increasingly full of erratic character behaviour and holes in storytelling. A halfway decent final fight occurs before it becomes clear it was just a setup for the “real” (anticlimatic) final fight. Odin lives up to its spirit of dragging things on and misallocating time till the very end!

But that’s enough about the “plot”. If you hoped the characters can redeem this wreck there’s only bad news. The cast is huge but ultimately there are only three characters: young gun (new crew), old salt (cap and boatswain) and the walking plot device (headache girl). The characterization is some of the thinnest you can find and the few attempts at any sort of character development are incredibly clumsy and in the end meaningless. The dramatic death scenes also fall short because no one has given a reason for the audience to care. As if characterization being nonexistent wasn’t bad enough way too often the actions some characters take make absolutely no sense given what (little) we know about them.

The most memorable “character” in the film is a vision of a guy named Asgard who is apparently king of “Odin” – and the sole claim for memorability he has is the hilarious way Japanese creators got the Norse mythology backwards with Asgard being a person and Odin a place.

The sole graces Odin has are high animation quality and some good mechanical designs. I’m quite fond of Starlight’s pulp SF look in particular and the animation doesn’t look too bad next to its highly appraised contemporaries Nausicaä and Macross: Do You Remember Love? - this isn’t surprising because while talented creative leaders apparently weren’t around the budget was clearly high.

Unfortunately even the visuals are rife with problems. The sheer dullness of character designs aside Odin features some of the most disgusting and dated 80s video effects imaginable. The blaring lights do their best obscure and shit on many otherwise decently framed shots and scenes. Starlight’s knob pushing button tweaking sequences are particularly painful to watch and the lighting effects really screw over one fight scene. Worst of all the otherwise fine design for Starlight gets covered in these effects most of the time and thus the ship’s nice design is more often than not wasted under goofy old SFX.

Always-unfitting-but-at-least-not-boring Loudness aside there’s not much to say about the sound. Score and effects are quite dull and it’s hard to say how much about acting is bad in itself and how much the problems in delivery simply stem from script that is occasionally so garbage there’s no way you can deliver the lines properly.

So, are there any reasons to watch this sad wreck already almost forgotten by history? If you have ability to derive entertainment from over the top bad anime you may find Odin a enjoyable watch with its weird storytelling and directing incompetence. Otherwise you should stay away from this overlong, turgid exercise in failure.

Best part of Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight is unquestionably the ending credits. For one it means the agony is finally over, secondly seeing real footage of Loudness performing is more entertaining than anything in the film proper. Aside from Loudness songs, that is.

Recommendations

The resemblance is given in the rescued girls, because in both animes are a girl who must save or cure but then realize that it's more than that. In Ozuma because Maya is important for being an 'original' able to call to Ozma, while Odin is Queen Sara is searching the Odin planet.
Upon meeting these girls the story of his rescuers change and undertake new goals.

Both are stories where the principal characters found with a eventful ship from elsewhere and that change your expectations. In Lensman they find guy who gives to Kim the lens and thus all that that entails, while Odin they help to Sara for try to find a mythical place.
In Lensman they change is absolutly of objetive, while in Odin undertake to find the planet but they not give up their fight against Bergel.

Both series have combined mythology and space travel. In Odin is a clear allusion to Norse mythology, while Ulysses 31 does Greek mythology because it is based on Homer's Odyssey.
In Odin the battles and the designs are better and more elaborate, and has a scheme more complex so to speak.
Ulysses, meanwhile, has a concise end while Odin was concluded before they had planned and can only solved part of the story.

The first similarity is that both series have trips through the galaxy.
Another point are the girls of royalty and the objectives they pose. In Starzinger is the Princess Aurora and her desire to bring peace to the galaxy, while Odin is Sara and her longing to return to their planet, containing the secrets of the universe and creation.